and colleges, but which are no more the types of their class than Parson Trulliber is a representative of the country clergy, or the stage Diggory of the English yeoman. But the self-complacency of Cockneyism is the most unshaken thing in this revolutionary age. It is perfectly ready to lecture the parson on the teaching of Greek, or the Yorkshire farmer on the fattening of bullocks. All the distributive machinery in the world does not diminish, it would seem, the absorption of intelligence by the Ward of Cheap. We are not, however, surprised that the conclusions, on which we have remarked, should be those arrived at by the large class of small observers whose phraseology we have quoted. The bustling man of business, who takes his day-ticket to Oxford or Cambridge, is of course struck by seeing a number of usages, for the original of which, if he inquire, he is referred back to hoar mediæval times--times which his Cockney guides dispose of by some such phrase as crass ignorance, or feudal barbarism. He is naturally surprised at such things; he never saw anything like it before; they don't do so in Mincing Lane, or even in Gower Street. He can hardly be expected to view these matters in their relation to the system of which they form a part; he can hardly be expected to realise in them the symbols through which the _genius loci_ finds an utterance and exerts an agency; and so he goes smiling home in his railway carriage, and perhaps buys a number of _Punch_ by the way, and thinks that there is more practical wisdom in that periodical than is embodied in the great monuments of William of Wykeham or Lady Margaret. Nevertheless, while we rebut these vague general charges of a blind impassibility to the influences of the time, we are far from denying that a tendency to cling to ancient ideas and observances is a characteristic of the universities. This tendency is a property of all corporate institutions, and is commonly the reason of their foundation. They are to perpetuate to a future time a feeling or design of the present; to form a nucleus, round which the thoughts and principles of one age congregate, and are thus handed down to another in a preserved and crystallised form. Changes of ideas pass upon them of necessity, through the individual liability of their constituent members to be affected by the current of the passing time; but these changes take place rather by a gradual fusion of the old into the new, than by those sudden transitions to which the popular and prevailing opinions are so often subjected. And it may fairly be supposed that, by means of this property, corporations are more likely to adopt and amalgamate into their framework that which is most permanent and genuine, out of all that the ever-changing tide of time casts upon the shore.